Grunts (36 page)

Swimming in the Village Seas

Mao Tse-tung once famously said that guerrilla warriors must move among the people as a fish swims in the sea. The combined action platoon Marines were American fish in a vast Vietnamese sea. As the program grew, CAPs began popping up all over I Corps. “Marine members of the CAPs live in the same tents, eat the same food, and conduct the same patrols and ambushes as their Vietnamese counterparts,” a 1967 report for General Krulak explained. The job was as much diplomatic as military. To the locals and the PFs, these Marines were the very face of America. The CAP members soon found that very little if anything they did escaped the notice of the Vietnamese. “They see everything we do—how we shave, how we dress, the way we talk to each other, the way we work,” Corporal Joseph Trainer, a team leader in Thuy Phu village, told an interviewer. “If we give them a bad impression, that’s the impression they’ll get of all Marines, and Americans.”

When Gunnery Sergeant John Brockaway established a CAP at a village in Quang Nam province, he found that the area had been under VC control for many months. The insurgents had told the villagers that U.S. Marines would rape their wives and daughters, steal their property, and kill their children. “When we first got there, you couldn’t get within a hundred meters of these people without some of them going in the opposite direction.” It took many weeks, and much good behavior, to loosen them up. Another Marine estimated that it took him about a month before he knew what was happening in his team’s village. “When you first come here, it’s hard, but then you begin to learn the customs and how the people operate . . . and pick it up eventually.”

The Marines had to be very careful not to arrogantly foist American values and cultural norms on their new Vietnamese acquaintances. This took patience and tact. The rural Vietnamese did not share American ideas of time, labor, or money. They did not think in punctual terms of having to be somewhere at a certain time. They did not adhere to a time schedule for getting jobs done. They especially did not conform to American hygiene standards. Their personal bathing and dental standards were not to the levels that Americans took for granted. Moreover, many Marines were shocked, and nauseated, to see the people publicly defecate “right outside their homes, or right outside the street in front of their homes,” in the recollection of one man. Quite commonly, the people also defecated in their rice paddies, combining waste disposal with fertilization. The Marines sometimes did, with local permission, build latrine facilities, but more commonly they had to accept such local customs or fail in their mission. For their part, the Vietnamese were a bit taken aback with the American penchant for using handkerchiefs. The idea of blowing one’s nose into a cloth and putting it back into one’s pocket was disgusting to them. “They wiped their noses on a banana leaf or just blew it on the ground,” John Daube, a corpsman, recalled.

Sexual mores were markedly different, too. In rural Vietnam, sexuality was almost puritanical. Sex before marriage was forbidden. However, mutual masturbation by two men was widely accepted. The Americans could not begin to understand this concept (especially on the occasions when they caught PFs indulging while on guard duty). Among the Vietnamese, two men often held hands as a sign of friendship. Thus, if a Vietnamese man attempted to take a Marine by the hand, he was offering a significant gesture of trust and friendship. But the Americans saw hand-holding among men as homosexuality, at a time when American popular culture greatly frowned on same-sex relationships.

Hailing from a youth-centered culture, the Americans were slow to understand the importance of elders to the Vietnamese. So the Marines tended to interact with children—who were generally friendly and exuberant—more than adults, particularly elderly people. “With kids being kids, and Marines being Marines, you get attached to them,” Lieutenant Thomas Eagan, commander of a combined action company named Delta-1, told an interviewer in 1967. Like many other Marines, he believed that making inroads with the kids would help the long-term effort in Vietnam. “They’ll have a good many Americans that they can remember . . . this I think is definitely going to sway them to an attempt to hang on to the country as they know it.” Perhaps, but this preoccupation with kids at the expense of elders sometimes cost them credibility with the average Vietnamese villager, until the Americans learned to reach out to everyone.

CAP squad leaders especially learned to cultivate village chiefs and district chiefs since both types of leaders were generally influential. Those who were not in league with the VC were usually in danger, so the security of a Marine CAP could be attractive to them. The mere act of sitting down, drinking tea with a chief, asking him how the Marines could help his people often held great sway. At times, it also yielded information on the VC or facilitated civic action projects for the village. Making this kind of headway with local leaders raised the status of the CAPs, and perhaps even legitimized them, in the eyes of villagers. Such on-the-ground support was, after all, a key objective of the combined action mission. When a CAP leader forged these relationships, it hardly guaranteed success, but he had little chance of accomplishing much without them.

Other cultural issues came from the unfortunate fact that some of the CAP Marines were boors who had no business being in the program. They dealt with people harshly, used racial slurs, broke squad rules about refraining from drinking and whoring, or just generally projected ill will. Most of these types did not last long on a team. Far more often, cultural problems resulted from simple American ignorance about local customs. CAP Marines, like most Americans, tended to pat kids on the head until they found out that many villagers believed this infested them with evil spirits. So, too, they had to learn to avoid crossing their legs or pointing their heels at their hosts when sitting in someone’s home. To the Vietnamese, the pointed heel meant that the person at whom it was pointed would die the next day. Lieutenant Eagan found, to his chagrin, that he committed a gratuitous cultural insult one day. “All I had done was to walk into a hootch and said something to one of the old men in the ville and I turned my back on his family altar without paying any sort of respect to it.” In a culture that was centered around ancestor worship, this was a grave offense indeed. It was no small matter tactically, either, because such an insult could easily cause the offended party to cast his lot with the VC, putting more American lives at risk.

CAP members also had to deal with the loss of face that resulted from errant firepower or damage inflicted by conventional units. When people got hurt or killed, it could unravel months of excruciating effort on the part of the CAP. Even when the damage was only material, tension was often high. Staff Sergeant David Thompson had to smooth over some very hurt feelings when a line unit carelessly destroyed a vase and several other sacred items in his village’s temple one night. “Whatever the troops do . . . goes back on the American government, and this does not make for good relations [with] the people.” These were the vagaries, and immense challenges, of operating in so alien a cultural environment.

Although some CAPs were aloof from their villagers, most did form some sort of relationship, many of which even culminated in strong ties of friendship. Generally, this happened quite gradually if the Marines behaved well and made an effort to insinuate themselves into the local customs and culture. The average Vietnamese peasant was caught in the middle of a vicious struggle that raged among the PFs, ARVN, the NVA, the VC (many of whom he probably knew), and the Americans. This meant that most of the people simply wanted the security to be left alone and live their lives in peace. “It’s not that so many people in Vietnam are Viet Cong,” one CAP leader explained as the combined action program was just starting to grow. “It’s that most of them will swing with . . . whoever’s got the strength. Because they don’t have anything to lose by going over to the Viet Cong when the VC are in their village; or going back to the government when the government comes in the village. But now you’ve got a ville that’s got khaki [a CAP] in it; it’s got medical attention there, it’s got people that care and people that show some friendliness and some interest. So the villager like any other human being begins to develop loyalties.”
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As foreigners, the Americans aroused a great deal of suspicion but also curiosity among the villagers. When the Vietnamese saw that the CAP Marines were willing to stay with them permanently, provide security, and blend in as best they could, they usually softened. One major indicator of this was when they invited Marines to share meals with them. This was such an important aspect of village culture that no American could turn down the opportunity. Thus, every CAP Marine had to be an adventurous eater. Corporal Michael Cousino found this out one day when a respected elder butchered a goat, drained its blood into a bowl, took a sip, and then offered it to Cousino. “I pretended to drink it by bringing the bowl up to my mouth and letting some blood form up around my lips. This way I wouldn’t offend him. He accepted me into his family.”

One time, the locals who lived near Thomas Flynn’s CAP at Cam Hieu honored the Marines with an elaborate feast. With great fanfare, they arranged pots and baskets full of rice, with boiled chicken alongside trays of pig brains, intestines, jellied blood, and raw fish that still had their heads and scales. Flynn, a meat-and-potatoes Irish kid from New Jersey, was a bit reluctant to dive into the spread but he knew he had no choice. “As I picked up a piece of the pig brain, the people watched with anticipation. When I swallowed it and smiled, they clapped their hands and laughed. I wondered if they were happy because they thought I really liked their food or if they were laughing because they were thinking that this dumb bastard is really eating this shit!” These meals sometimes resulted in invitations to weddings, funerals, family gatherings and the like, for even more eating. The Americans learned to always leave something on their plates because, in Vietnamese culture, if a guest cleaned his plate, it meant that the host had not prepared enough food and he or she lost face.

Most of the Marines grew to like the local fare, especially the Nuoc Mam sauce with which Vietnamese flavored so many dishes. Corporal Barry Goodson made a point of buying sauce-soaked pork and fish sandwiches from nearby merchants whom he befriended over time. At times, a sandwich could be bug-infested, but Goodson hardly cared. “Eating it was a simple way to strengthen my bond with our Vietnamese counterparts.” Sometimes, during day patrols, people invited the Marines to join them for lunch. Other times, they sat down together for full-fledged dinners of rice, fish, watermelons, and carrots. “After they eat they will sit and watch us, and laugh at the way we use their [chop]stick and eat their food,” Sergeant Alexander Wert, a squad leader, said in early 1967. “It’s all good natured. We laugh at them and they laugh at us, it’s always a lot of fun.”

Most commonly, the two peoples exchanged or mixed their foods. This was especially true among the Marines and PFs. The Marines were not shy about dispensing C rations, soda, and chocolate to their allies. When Sergeant Jim Donovan, who headed up a squad in Tuy Loan village, found out that his PFs liked Salem cigarettes and Orange Crush soda, he passed out these products as a reward for good behavior. He also loved Vietnamese food and enjoyed many mixed meals with the PFs. “I like rice and soup with the noodles. I ate at least one meal a day with a Vietnamese.” They would mix C ration chicken and noodles with the local version. “They [PFs] would take the noodles and throw ’em away. Then they would make their own noodles and they’d eat the [C ration] chicken.” Donovan was amazed that the PFs actually liked ham and lima beans, the most despised C ration meal for practically all Americans in Vietnam.
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The single biggest cultural problem was the language barrier. Even among the CAP Marines very few could speak Vietnamese with any semblance of fluency. Most knew only common phrases, slang expressions, and the odd word or two. Lance Corporal Richard Wildagel had thirty days of language training in Danang before joining his CAP, and the course was useful, but his communication with the people was still so limited that he often relied on hand signals and gestures. He found that he had to make a daily effort to be conversant. “Just by being in the ville, you can pick up a lot, just by listening to the people, or asking what something is.” Corporal Dukin Elliot went to language school in the States for nearly a year. He was well ahead of his colleagues in his ability to communicate with people, but even he had troubles. “It’s a difficult language to learn, because you can write a word the same way and it has different meanings.” Only one man on David Sherman’s team had any linguistic training and it was practically useless in Ky Hoa, their remote village. “His instructor was Saigonese. Vietnamese as spoken in Saigon is much different from what is spoken in the countryside. Out there dialects can change considerably in 10 miles.”

Sergeant Donovan’s squad even had an ARVN interpreter assigned to it. Of course, this yielded tremendous influence to this individual since he literally controlled the vital power of communication (a phenomenon familiar a generation later to many small-unit leaders in Iraq who also relied far too heavily on their interpreters). This meant he had to be reliable. Unfortunately, Donovan’s ARVN was not. A visiting Special Forces major who knew some Vietnamese eavesdropped on the man as he questioned the locals and found he was feeding Donovan bad information. The interpreter ended up getting drunk and deserting. Fortunately for Donovan’s team, he was replaced with a South Vietnamese Marine Corps sergeant who was loyal, courageous, and who spoke excellent English. “He gave me a lot of history of Vietnam. He got a lot out of people. They really liked him.”

Most of the CAPs were on their own, though. The language barrier would have been a challenge even if the American preparation for it had been barely adequate. As it was, the Marines learned to get by as best they could. Those who at least made an attempt to speak Vietnamese tended to get along well with people. Of course, many of the Vietnamese, particularly the PFs, spoke some English. A surprising number of militiamen could converse to some extent. Children, always so adaptable, sometimes picked up English with stunning alacrity, and acted as vital go-betweens.